Contact centers or call centers are centralized systems that distribute telephony calls among a plurality of personnel at such call centers. However, it is increasingly desirable for agents in contact centers to efficiently perform additional tasks other than addressing incoming telephony calls. In such multi-functional or multimedia contact centers, it is desirable, e.g., for agents to respond to email, respond to Internet online information requests, review (offline) information supplied by customers (e.g., loan requests, health care forms, etc.). Unfortunately, for contact center tasks that are not initiated by an incoming call, it has been difficult to efficiently manage and assign such tasks to agents. Part of this difficulty is due to the fact that there has been heretofore no integrated task assignment system for efficiently allocating contact center agents for both responding to incoming calls as well as performing other tasks.
Typically, the distribution of incoming calls within a contact center is performed substantially automatically by telephony equipment that includes an “automatic call distributor” (ACD). An ACD is a specialized phone system (or portion thereof) for handling a large volume of incoming calls, and distributing the calls among the personnel (usually denoted agents) according to particular criteria such as to minimize caller waiting time, and/or to route calls to appropriate agents. For example, an ACD may keep track of which agents are available for taking an incoming call, and may direct calls to agents whose telephone lines are not busy. In some cases, an ACD may direct calls based on what a caller selects by, e.g., pressing the telephone keypad (the caller, for example, might respond to recorded system prompts to enter an account number or choose a service option). Thus, an ACD may both route and queue calls to one or more groups of agents, wherein for each group, the agents therein have particular skills appropriate to respond to particular types of calls. Moreover, an ACD is typically programmable so that changes in matching incoming calls with appropriate informational sources (e.g., agents) may be programmatically changed. Additionally, ACDs are able to generate detailed reports regarding the call traffic being experienced and/or processed.
In some contact centers, assignment of agents to tasks not initiated by an incoming call is entirely manual such as a bullhorn, loudspeaker, and/or manually maintained boards attached to the walls of the contact center. In other contact centers, one or more additional computer systems may also be used to distribute work to agents or dispatch agents to work. However, since these additional automation systems are not integrated with the ACD, conflicts result with the ACD, and/or at least some of the call distribution features of the ACD may be rendered inoperative. In some contact centers, contact center personnel initiate incoming telephony calls to particular agents merely to establish a telephony connection to a particular agent so that the ACD will cease from routing incoming calls to the agent for as long as the telephony connection to the agent's phone is maintained. Thus, since such “agent free up” calls do not require the agent to perform any tasks other than accept the call and subsequently terminate the call at some future time, the agent is free in the meantime to perform tasks other than answering incoming calls. However, this latter technique ties up telephony lines that otherwise could be used for processing substantive incoming calls. Moreover, since the ACD (or the corresponding private branch exchange (PBX)) typically collects data related to, e.g., the number of incoming calls processed, the length of such calls, the number of calls processed per agent (or group of agents), and the time incoming calls are queued, such agent “free up” calls distort the statistics collected by the ACD (or PBX). Additionally, if there are other computer systems also attempting to control an agent's time, such other work assignment systems will not be affected, and accordingly, further steps can be required to notify, fool or circumvent such other work assignment systems as well. In particular, where the contact center also assigns agents to take automatically dialed outgoing calls (by, e.g., what is known as a “dialer” in the art), the dialer also must be in some manner notified, fooled or circumvented if an agent is to perform tasks outside of the control of the dialer.
Additionally, some contact centers use what is known in the art as “phantom calls” to provide various notifications of agent availability or unavailability to the ACD. Phantom calls are calls having no caller identification information. Thus, phantom calls typically have no voice channel. For ACDs (and/or their associated PBXs) that can utilize phantom calls, such calls may be treated substantially as a voice call by such ACDs. However, phantom calls: (a) may have various manufacturer limitations on their use, (b) may require a predetermined collection of phantom call lines and/or phantom extensions to be allocated, (c) may increase the cost of the contact center telephony system (e.g., the PBX and ACD) and (d) when phantom calls are used to assign an agent to task different from answering incoming calls, the phantom call must remain active for the duration of the time the agent performs the task. Moreover, many legacy PBXs and legacy ACDs currently in use do not support phantom calls.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to have an alternative method and system for efficiently assigning both incoming and outgoing calls to contact center agents as well as assigning other tasks such as responding to email, and responding to online or chat Internet information requests. Additionally, it would be desirable to enhance contact center contact processing systems so that for both telephony and non-telephony agent activities and tasks, routing and monitoring are more effectively performed, and wherein various agent task management systems are more fully integrated with the task assignment capabilities of the ACD.